Breakfast Briefing: Netflix rebounds with eye-popping Q3 user numbers

Netflix’s Q3 numbers rebounded in a big way. After missing earnings and user numbers in Q2, the platform added nearly 7 million users in the most recent period, satisfying watchers of its most important metric. Nearly 6 million of the new users came from overseas.

One of Netflix’s video rivals, YouTube, suffered an outage early Wednesday morning, showing users a blank page instead of content. The downtime affected users in the U.S., Japan, and Australia, among other regions.

More top executives are fleeing Saudi Arabia’s major investment conference. The head of the International Monetary Fund and the leaders of two French banks have decided not to go to the Future Investment Initiative as media reports link the disappearance of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to Saudi security services.

Facebook is being sued by a group of small advertisers who claim the company knew it was misleading marketers about inflated advertising metrics, but didn’t tell them for more than a year. Facebook acknowledged in 2016 that it was using inflated video-view numbers.

The top State Department spokesperson is reportedly being considered as Nikki Haley’s replacement. President Donald Trump is reportedly mulling Heather Nauert, also a former Fox News host, for the post of U.N. ambassador.